Thursday, September 27, 2012

The Plot Against Occupy

Thunder rumbled and rain pattered on the leaves as
Connor Stevens tramped through the darkness down a wooded path to the
base of the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge. A sad-eyed
20-year-old poet from the Cleveland suburbs, Stevens was crouched in the
foliage, his baby face obscured by a bushy lumberjack's beard. Beside
him ducked two friends from Occupy Cleveland – the group that had come
to define Stevens and his place in the world – both as gaunt and grungy
as Stevens himself. Farther up the trail, Stevens knew, three other
comrades were acting as lookouts. Gingerly, the young men opened the two
black toolboxes they'd carried down from their van. Inside were eight
pounds of C4 explosives.

They were actually going through with it. The six of them were going to blow up a bridge.

That they were on the brink of something so epic was surprising, even
to the crew, a hodgepodge of drifters plus a pair of middle-class
seekers: quiet Stevens and puppyishly excitable Brandon Baxter, also 20.
Anarchists who had grown disenchanted with the Occupy movement, which
they considered too conservative, they yearned to make a radical
statement of their own – to send a message to corporate America, its
corrupt government and that invisible grid underlying it all, the
System.
They'd joined Occupy Cleveland in the fall, but over the winter
they'd waited in vain for the group to pick a direction before finally
taking matters into their own hands. For weeks they'd fantasized about
the mayhem they'd wreak, puerile talk of stink bombs and spray paint
that had anted up to discussion of all the shit they'd blow up if only
they could. But the grandiosity of their hopes stood in stark contrast
to their mundane routine. They spent their days getting stoned at their
Occupy­subsidized commune in a downtown warehouse, squabbling over dish
duty and barely making their shifts at the Occupy Cleveland info tent;
when they managed to scrounge up a couple of cans of Spaghettios for
dinner, it was celebrated as an accomplishment. If not for the help of
their levelheaded comrade Shaquille Azir, who at this critical moment
stood as lookout, hissing, "How much longer is this gonna take?" the
plot might never have come together.Inside Occupy Wall Street

The boys anxiously fiddled with the safety switch on one of the IEDs.
Even on this April night, as they planted two bombs, the plan felt
slapdash. No one knew how to handle the explosives. They had no getaway
plan. At one point they'd discussed closing the bridge with traffic
cones to minimize casualties – 13,000 vehicles crossed the bridge daily –
but there was no mention of that now. Some of the accomplices weren't
even clear on the evening's basic agenda. "Do we plant tonight and go
boom tomorrow?" Baxter had asked in the van. "No, we're going to
detonate these tonight," someone had clarified.

The red light on the other IED winked on, signaling it was armed.
"One is good to go," Stevens announced. "We just gotta do this one." A
night-vision camera mounted nearby captured the boys' movements as they
hunched around the second IED until its light shone. Then all six jogged
back to the van, relief in their voices. "We just committed the biggest
act of terrorism that I know of since the 1960s," Stevens said, as a
recording device memorialized every word. All that was left now was for
the boys to pick a location from which to push the detonators and go
boom. They were feeling pretty good. They decided to go to Applebee's.

Nothing
was destined to blow up that night, as it turns out, because the entire
plot was actually an elaborate federal sting operation. The case
against the Cleveland Five, in fact, exposes not just a deeply misguided
element of the Occupy movement, but also a shadowy side of the federal
government. It's hardly surprising that the FBI decided to infiltrate
Occupy; given the movement's challenge of the status quo and its hectic
patchwork of factions – including ones touting subversive agendas – the
feds worried it could become a terrorist breeding ground. Since 9/11,
the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force has been charged with preventing
further terrorist attacks. But anticipating and disrupting terrorist
plots require both aggressive investigative techniques and a staggering
level of collaboration and resources; to pull together the Cleveland
case alone, the FBI coordinated with 23 different agencies. The hope, of
course, is that the results make it all worthwhile: The plot is
detected and heroically foiled, the evildoers arrested, and the American
public sleeps easier. The problem is that in many cases, the government
has determined that the best way to capture terrorists is simply to
invent them in the first place.

"The government has a responsibility to prevent harm," says former
FBI counterterrorism agent Michael German, now the senior policy counsel
for the ACLU. "What they're doing instead is manufacturing threatening
events."

That's just how it went down in Cleveland, where the defendants
started out as disoriented young men wrestling with alienation, identity
issues and your typical bucket of adolescent angst. They were
malleable, ripe for some outside influence to coax them onto a new path.
That catalyst could have come in the form of a friend, a family member
or a cause. Instead, the government sent an informant.
And not just any informant, but a smooth-talking ex-con – an
incorrigible lawbreaker who racked up even more criminal charges while
on the federal payroll. From the start, the government snitch nurtured
the boys' destructive daydreams, egging them on every step of the way,
giving them the encouragement and tools to turn their Fight Club-tinged
tough talk into reality. To follow the evolution of the bombing plot
under the informant's tutelage is to watch five young men get a giant
federal-assisted upgrade from rebellious idealists to terrorist
boogeymen. This process looks a lot like what used to be called
entrapment.